Blog: Pandora

This evening, we are hosting our second live event as part of a new listener appreciation series. Tonight's concert features Portugal. The Man, and we've invited some of the band's most avid New York City fans to a free show at The Bowery Ballroom. One of the central missions of Pandora is to bring together bands and fans. We've been successfully doing that online for some time now, so it's exciting to see this offline component now coming to life! We've started a special page on Pandora so that fans across the country can follow the [...]

We had a great get-together last Thursday in our very own hometown of Oakland, CA at a perfect spot called Preservation Park, right downtown. A really large crowd showed up, loaded with lots of questions and comments: There were many questions about how we decide what music goes in Pandora, and on how artists are paid - including from a number of musicians whose music is on Pandora. There were also questions and suggestions about advertising on our site - is it targeted? For example, one married attendee [...]

We had a great get-together last Thursday in our very own hometown of Oakland, CA at a perfect spot called Preservation Park, right downtown. A really large crowd showed up, loaded with lots of questions and comments: There were many questions about how we decide what music goes in Pandora, and on how artists are paid - including from a number of musicians whose music is on Pandora. There were also questions and suggestions about advertising on our site - is it targeted? For example, one married attendee [...]

I have lost count of the number of times a Pandora listener has told me that they learned about our service from their hair dresser, dentist, barista or bartender. I've also been saving a long list of emails from business owners, large and small, who have written to us in growing numbers since we launched Pandora asking when we might offer Pandora for use in a commercial setting. I'm really excited to be able to tell these folks that we now have an offering just for them. We have recently established a partnership with a company called [...]

Great town hall last night in Milwaukee at the Iron Horse. In spite of rain and a Brewers playoff game we had a full house (though we ended in time for folks to see the last few innings, Brewers leading by one). Lots of great conversation as usual, including quite a bit of discussion about the advertising on Pandora. Listeners clearly have a desire to find different ways to interact with the ads - book marking them, saving for later, expressing preferences on their [...]

I had the rare treat of meeting with, and presenting Pandora and the Music Genome Project to the scientist who actually discovered DNA, Dr. James Watson. He's a wonderful man with an obvious curiosity, and some very strong opinions about Chinese opera! Had a terrific time touring the Cold Spring Harbor facility out on Long Island, where a global assembly of some of the world's brightest natural scientists come together to do bench research. We convened for a town hall in a seminar room full of biologists and their friends to talk Genome. [...]

In a fun recent development, for the first time ever we now have Pandora One gift cards available in Target stores across the country. It's really exciting to see Pandora featured in a retail location. Something about a physical object in a brick and mortar store that feels a bit different, and really cool. They make a great gift - especially for all of you last-minute gift givers (you know who you are). Enjoy! Tim (Founder)

Over the past few years we've heard a growing chorus of listeners asking about our plans for bringing Pandora into the car. Many of you are likely plugging your smartphones into an aux jack to get Pandora through your car speakers already, but we know that the long term solution is something more seamlessly integrated with the vehicle. To that end, for several years now we've had an extensive engineering and business effort underway to bring Pandora into vehicle dashboards - and it's now starting to bear fruit, with Pandora-enabled cars and trucks actually hitting the [...]

Today is a big day for Pandora: after more than a year of planning, design, engineering, and beta testing we're launching an entirely new Pandora website. In late 2010 we started with a clean sheet of paper, challenging ourselves to create a new internet radio experience that was fast, social, and easy while still being familiar to the tens of millions of people that listen to Pandora each month. The result is "New Pandora" -- the same personalized radio experience you've enjoyed for years, wrapped in a new HTML5 look that makes it more [...]

As we've settled into a larger office space in downtown Oakland, we have recently restarted our Pandora Concert Series of intimate shows for Pandora employees. These performances take place on our very own stage in our common area, affectionately called "Backstage." Recently, we've been honored to welcome and hear the Mother Hips , Ben Folds and, most recently, Oakland's own Raphael Saadiq , whom I interviewed after he and his band played a rocking set. When we welcome artists to our office, the first stop is typically a high-level behind the scenes [...]

We've been hard at work on the new version of Pandora.com since my last update here -- processing your feedback, fixing bugs and generally improving the entire experience. We'd all like to give a big "thank you" to those of you who have experimented with the new site and taken time to share your thoughts with us. We're dedicated to making the new site faster, easier, and more social than any version of Pandora that has come before and your feedback is helping to us turn that vision into reality. Right now, every Pandora One subscriber has [...]

After working away in secret for over a year, we're finally ready to take the wraps off an entirely new pandora.com. We've rebuilt it from the ground up to be fast, easy, beautiful and modern. This morning TechCrunch has an exclusive look at the new site and you can learn more about it here . Today marks the beginning of a phased rollout that will take place over the coming weeks and months. Our goal is to use this period to get your feedback about the new site and to polish things up so [...]

We crossed a milestone at Pandora today: this morning we began trading as a public company on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the symbol "P." It's a very proud moment for all of us, and we've all paused for a moment to take it all in. A number of us were on Wall Street to witness the opening day, and we've celebrated the moment with our teams all across the country. It's really something to see people actually start to buy stock in your company. Pretty cool! Most importantly though, [...]

Dear Listeners - We're excited to say that we are officially in the business of telling jokes! Starting now, you can launch personalized comedy stations on Pandora from any genre or comedian. Adding comedians to the mix has been one of the top requests from our listeners, so we've taken the same approach to comedy as we have to music: carefully and deliberately analyzing comedic "bits" across a very large number of attributes to capture the style, delivery and content of each performance. It's been a very fun experience, taking what we've learned in [...]

Just over a week ago, on Sunday, April 24th at 4:46pm, "Ridin' Solo" by Jason DeRulo received Pandora's 10 billionth thumb . 10 BILLION...wow! Of the many milestones we've hit over the past 6 years, this is perhaps the one that makes us most proud. We created Pandora to bring personalization to radio, to allow each individual to determine the sound of their stations, and to make it as simple and intuitive as possible. There is no greater evidence for us of meeting that objective than the ongoing engagement you have all shown in [...]

Hey, it's Tim from Pandora - I'm writing to wish you a very Happy New Year from all of us here at Pandora! And what a year it was... First, a heartfelt thanks to all of you for continuing to be such engaged listeners and such wonderful evangelists. In 2010 we doubled our audience to over 75 million people! And that was mostly thanks to continued word of mouth. For that we are deeply appreciative. As always, interacting with listeners continues to be our greatest joy, and greatest source of feedback. [...]

Dear Listeners: We're excited to share with you some new themed stations we've just created that allow you to easily listen to the most popular songs of 2010. This look back across the country's popular tastes from this last year includes everything from chart-topping Pop Hits to Country, Alternative, Jazz, R&B songs, and many more. And, in the spirit of literally ending the year on a high note , we also have a special New Year's Eve Party station that you can find among the new Themed stations. [...]

Year after year, we are consistently blown away by the popularity of Holiday music on Pandora. This year we thought it would be fun to survey some of our users to get their perspective on Holiday music and we found that just as we suspected, they certainly do have a sense of humor! Check out the questions and results, below. We are sure you will be feeling full of good cheer (and maybe even "Eggnoggy") by the time you're finished reading... Happy Holidays and Happy Listening! [...]

For more than forty years, Dan Hicks & the Hot Licks have written and recorded in a style that embraces many American sounds, including folk, swing and country-western. Over the years, he has recorded with such luminaries as Willie Nelson, Elvis Costello and Tom Waits. In the latest episode of our free audio podcast , Hicks performs in the studio and shows us what he does to arrive at his sound. The song he reverse-engineers, "Santa's Workshop," is from his new Crazy for Christmas -- scroll down the [...]

Well, we capped off the Dakotas/Nebraska tour with a lecture at Augustana College in Sioux Falls (thanks to the Sioux Falls Jazz and Blues Society) on Thursday and a terrific town hall that evening; then a meetup at the amazing Durham museum in Omaha last night (with a relaxing drive across the plains in between). We sure lucked out on the weather this trip. Not a flake of snow. Sioux Falls - thanks to Jeremy and the crew at the Museum for Visual Materials for being such a great host and for spreading the news [...]